We're actually over 7 billion for a few years now.

Yeah, but overpopulation isn't as much of an issue in the first world as it is in the third world. So telling people to have less kids here is like sterilizing yourself because the neighbor has too many kids.

I was like that a few years ago actually, being very adamant about overpopulation and I was very negative about people having kids. But eventually I realized the problem isn't here, so I was a bit misguided. We actually need people to have more kids here because like others have said, we have an aging and shrinking population. Who are going to take care of all of the elders?

This is a bit off topic though

Don't forget, 1st world countries use a LOT more resources per person than 3rd world, so if we don't want to destroy the environment AND want to live a lifestyle that would be acceptable to us, the only solution is not increasing the population. After the baby boomers, who are mostly retired now, grew up people had fewer kids (not living on farms, vaccinations keeping them from dying, etc) it continues to get lower, though in the US today a lot of it is due to most young people (even into their 30s) simply aren't paid enough to start a family.

I was waiting for this.
If a fetus is not a part of a womans body, it has no right to the use of her organs. It's the same reasoning that makes it illegal for others to harvest your organs for use by another, even if that other may die without them.

Take it up with biology if you have a problem that a woman and a woman ALONE has the right to control/use her own body. There are also a dozen or so ways that man could have a child without her, namely: Adoption, a different woman, a surrogate, or frozen sperm + egg donor (If he wants to be a father THAT badly, why didn't he plan ahead? Why is it the womans job to make his dreams come true, like some sort of ovary genie?). Just as a man has a right to use a condom if he doesn't want a child, a woman has the right to reject a pregnancy that she doesn't want to carry to term.

^ Yup.
As long as the man isn't the person with the womb, his wishes should come second to the woman's wishes. He can get his opinions heard, of course, and he can try his best to make her change her mind, but he has no right to force the woman to either 1: Go through with an abortion if she doesn't want to, or 2: Force her to go until term with the pregnancy if she doesn't want to. Likewise, she has no right to force him to sterilize himself if he doesn't want to, or hinder him from sterilizing if he wants to. She can tell him that there's not going to be any fun-time without a condom (and/or other contraceptives) if she doesn't want kids, though - and he should insist on wearing one if he doesn't want kids (even when using other contraceptives - double protection is always safer).



In 1st world countries we do have the possibility to use less resources without it even being noticeable in our everyday lives. It's much up to product and food producers and governments, and how consumers of various services go about their consuming.

You don't need 3 cars per family, two full fridges for a 4-person family, or a freezer filled to the brim with food you bought just because it was on sale. You don't need a new cellphone every single year just because the new model has a slightly better camera, or an overstuffed closet with mostly clothes you've used once and aren't intending to use more. You don't need to redecorate the house every five years. You don't need furniture made from rainforest woods, or a giant house with more rooms than you ever need, filled with furniture you may not even use. It is possible to be responsible consumers who buy things they will use several times, and who buy food responsibly. It is possible for producers and sellers of products to do something about their methods so less resources go to waste. Food near sell-by date and products going out of productioncan be sold cheaper or given away to organizations that help people in need instead of being thrown away, for instance. Governments could butt in and rise minimum wages to give less fortumate people a chance, and instead rise taxes for the richest people (they usually have more than enough to take from anyway). Ways to produce less garbage is always a good thing, and using your feet (or a bike, or public transport) instead of your car may help a bit on both the environment and your health. There's lots of little things that can be done. People just need to be willing to make changes.

It doesn't take that much to give someone a better chance in a 3rd world country. Easier access to clean water and more nutritious food (preferably the kind they can get a hold of on their own through growing, fishing, hunting or trading/buying), cheap or free healthcare and education, better protection through laws for women (who are often enough victims of rape, and in some societies have fewer rights than men), better access to jobs for women and childcare help for working women, and safer environments (local warfare can be a problem in some parts of the world), among other things. Fixing their living conditions need to be done before there's a point in telling them that having more kids than they can handle isn't a good idea (often enough it isn't even the woman's fault, but rather things like anti-abortion laws or societies that "push" the importance of having kids, rape, and the personal wish to see at least one or two kids grow up so they can take care of their parents when they get old - because of the overused reason "this is how it's been for generations").

Also, give out birth control in those countries and give out info to counter certain religions that say even birth control is a sin - and often have a lot of influence. Maybe not even allow missionaries in UNLESS they are actually providing something useful - food, work, etc not preaching, bibles, etc.

Never even heard of them.

I agree that religious organizations with such agendas should not be allowed to preach their ways - but there are a lot of organizations with religious backgrounds that do a lot of good work without neccessarily being the preachy kind, pr the bad kind of preachy.

The Salvation Army seems fairly decent, for instance. They do a lot of such work, and I never heard a bad word as a child (I went to sunday school and family evenings in the local SA building, and for a religious environment it was quite child-friendly and they never promoted anything bad that I can remember - it was more in the "Jesus loves you" street than anything else, which I guess is the least you can expect from a religious organization. I know several people who've worked within the organization, and I don't have anything bad to say about any of them from what I've personally seen). They do a lot for homeless people, too - offering food and shelter at night. I'm not entirely sure how they operate elsewhere in the world, though.

The SA has been known to discriminate against gay people and single parents. I heard of them giving a toy to a child and taking it away when they saw it was a single mother. I prefer secular, like Doctors Without Borders, or Non-Belief Relief.

Like I said, I don't know how they operate elsewhere - but here they're mostly decent (not sure on their stance on the LGBT+ community, because I stopped going to those meetings in my early teens before I even knew a LGBT+ community existed, but I can't remember them talking about it being bad). There may be examples of particular people being intolerant, or particular SA communities not being tolerant, and for all I know they may have opinions on such things that I don't know of or have experienced. I can only talk of what I experienced as a child in the 90s. They don't seem to have anything against single mothers here, though. I guess the society I live in is more open-minded when it comes to non-hetero relationships, and there's also been a positive shift in several of the religious organizations lately, so maybe it's more of a society thing. Religious people often tend to be the last ones to reach the goal line in regards to acceptance of other ways of thinking, such as LGBT+ relationships actually being just as valid and okay as hetero ones.

Just because one particular person within the organization has something against gay people or single parents, doesn't mean absolutely everyone in the organization share the same opinions. It also doesn't have to mean they do a bad job in other areas, though it's not in any way positive if they have such views in general. Looking down on LGBT+ people seems to be a common thing in various religious communities, and I wish it was different.

Anyway, it was just an example. There are probably both better and worse religious humanitarian organisations out there.

I also prefer (non-prophet) secular organizations over religious ones, because then at least one secondary agenda is wiped off the chart. Religious organizations can do a lot of good work, but there's always that grain of doubt in regards to whether they're doing it just to help people, or if they're also trying to convert people into their belief system, and if that belief system has serious flaws like not accepting LGBT+ people or banning contraceptives, then I'd rather see they didn't have anything to do with the education part of the help, leaving that to someone who isn't biased. Such harmful views don't need spreading.

Writer of The Handmaid's Tale.
https://www.mic.com/articles/178888...tm_campaign=mic

I do have to be careful. I HAVE been banned places for going off on anti-choice people, the same I would against racists or such.

India and Bangladesh are some of the most overpopulated countries in the world and also one of the worst contributors to the environmental issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envir...issues_in_India

Also, no one addressed my question: Who is going to take care of the Elders? How are so few young people going to take care of the aging population?


Then don't. There's no need to be so aggressive, it's highly ineffective too. It doesn't make people want to listen to you.

... Shipping them over to elder care facilities and let those who work there do the job?

In all seriousness, where this isn't already a problem, it will most likely become one in the near future. There's a general lack of nurses (and few seem to want to work in elder care), so the level of care these elders are getting may eventually be a problem. Life expectancy is slowly rising too, so living until 80-90 is more common than it used to be, and not everyone is ready to take care of their older family members with various medical problems or even dementia at home. Some elders manage fine on their own or with just a bit of help from family, but a lot of them need anything from a bit of home care nursing to being in a 24/7 care facility. The quality of the care they are getting is often linked to the working conditions of the people working in those settings. Few workers and a lot of stress usually means less time to do anything but the most neccessary care. Like I said previously, this may be because the generation(s) getting old now were the result of baby boom generations where people still had 3+ kids. Since that number is dwindling a little bit now, we may see the ratio of young people to elders level out a bit more when the generations with fewer kids overall gets old. It's only speculation, though. By then, maybe the life expectancy is a hundred, and we still have more elders than young people to take care of them.

Maybe if the nursing home owners weren't so greedy and paid a decent wage. Many of the aides at them are immigrants now.

I think big families should be taxed extra and not get benefits for using so many resources. It's really selfish to have so many kids with things the way they are. As to going off on people that got me banned places, I was younger then (early 30s, now 45.) I still feel anti-abortion is repressive and fascist.

That's pretty hostile and with no reason. Why should they be given extra breaks for using MORE resources and such? It's racist/ethnocentric wanting the current race/ethnicity to go up in regards to other ones.

Well, there still needs to be something done about overpopulation. And what about the extremes like the quiverfull movement? These are people like the Duggars.

When religious people try to pass laws based on their religion, as they do in the US quite often, it's everyone's business. The whole reason for that movement is to try to make more Christian fundamentalist so they can have a majority. US population is still growing. Population CAN'T keep growing. It will end in mass starvation or a major pandemic. Even at current population we are doing severe damage to the environment. Constant growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.

Some people may have other reasons for being against abortion than religion (though it seems being part of some sort of Judeo-Christian belief system is a non-spoken requirement in the US government, so that might be why they manage to vote for and pass such laws).

This is not just an US problem, but happens several other places too. We had a similar issue lately with a Christian-based party in our government where they tried to remove/change one of the abortion laws - and if not they threatened to withdraw support for a collaboration of parties they were in, which caused a big uproar, particularly because the surrounding parties seemed to want to go through with it because they didn't want to lose that party's support. Politics... My country is technically leaned toward rather liberal protestantism, so most of the non-immigrant population are in the vague Christian cloud of occasionally going to church and follow vaguely Christian traditions - but the majority of the population wouldn't in any way fit the description of fundamentalists. Even the Christian party I mentioned probably wouldn't fit that description. Some of the US politicians might, though... Some of them seem rather hell-bent on getting their religious views across.

Using buzz words such as "fundamentalists" won't get your point across any better, at least not unless you have something to back it up.

Maybe you have amazing Eldercare in your country but here it is abhorrent. They don't "do their job", because the government never prioritizes the elderly, so they don't have the resources for it. Some elders barely get any food. So with an aging population, this issue is just going to get bigger. I don't think more immigration is the solution. Any country that would steer towards replacing its own population as a "solution" is not looking out for its own interests anymore. Not to mention the loss of culture that would lead to. Also known as gradual genocide. Sweden is a perfect horror example of what happens with severe culture clashes. Swedes should be encouraged to have more children instead.

I realize you were probably half-joking but I just needed to put that out there.

Here in the US there really isn't one culture. Everyone is an immigrant or descendant of immigrants, except Native Americans. People have worried about them changing things since the 19th Century, and it only ended up good for the country having the diversity. In the 1840s it was the Irish, 1870s the Chinese, Later 19th/Early 20th it was Eastern Europeans and Italians. Now it's Latin Americans. There will always be bigots. That's one thing different where you are, you have a distinct people who lived there for very, very long - like before the Western Hemisphere was found by Europeans. For Nursing homes, nobody wants really to work in one except as doctors, nurses or high up positions. The ones who do most of the caretaking are very poorly paid and it's a hard job, so it's not one that can easily be filled. There's also still the drastic environmental problems with current population, the higher it gets the worse it will be, and it won't be possible to feed everyone.

It's not amazing, and by no means perfect, but in most institutions the elders do get relatively good care, enough food, and have at least some activities they can do. Home care is a bit touch-and-go (literally, in some cases), and very time-sensitive, but it's probably not the worst out there.

A lot of the downsides come down to problems with regional economy, since most institutions are managed by the local government partly via state funding. I've worked in a couple institutions and had some experience from other places via nursing practice, and while there are problems here and there, sometimes small, other times big, it's mostly a matter of economy and how it's used, because most of the people working in these places do the best they can with what they have.



Exactly what is happening in Sweden? There was a newsreport a while back where a lot of Swedes were asked what they thought "about what was happening in Sweden" and none of them seemed to have a clue what was even supposed to be wrong. I know there was talk about riots and putting a stop on immigration or welcoming immigration or some such, but the news have been rather silent on those things lately.


Not where I live. At the nursing home where I work, we've gone through 3 bosses and at least 4-5 doctors the past couple years (don't think they were easy to find), and several nurses have quit. But we seem to have an abundance of people with a lower education level and assistants who want to work there (it's more of an "if you apply you're almost guaranteed to get the job" situation atm). Nurses in general are lacking, not just in nursing homes but at hospitals too.

Considering over half of the world population live in Asia (between 2.5 and 3 billion for China and India alone), North America may not be the world's biggest problem when it comes to population... According to the UN estimates on Wikipedia, India may go past China by 2030, while the US population looks like it could slow down a bit compared to the previous 15 years.

China at least tried to do something about it when they started their one-child policy (I think they're now at two children per household?) but they had the disadvantage of it being more profitable to have boys because of old traditions, which had consequences for a lot of unwanted girls. Not sure how this has evolved lately, but it did seem to be a problem for a while.

Doesn't seem like India has any such policies (that I know of, anyway), which might be why they're soon ahead of China. It's a big country, but cramming 20% of the world population in there is a bit much... Same with China.